Appreciating The Layers of My Life
November 30, 2008 by rtwsenior · Leave a Comment
I was reading through the journal entries for July, 2008, four months ago, when I was right in the middle of trying to publish my book and to start my two blogs. The next trip was only a vague idea in the earliest stages. Now, so much has been finished and I’m within a month of departure on a well-conceived new trip. Here’s what I had to say:
(07-21-08) Yesterday, I freed up my workload a little bit by popping the manuscript back to Lynn, my copyeditor. At four, I went to the beach for a very long walk, almost to the end of Caladesi, so that was good and needed for exercise. During that walk, I reviewed all of the gradual levels of the creation of these things that I’m bringing into the Realm of Tangibility. I began my thinking way back at the beginning of this project’s origins: my travels to the USSR in the 1990s, which stemmed from the job I had in 1989, with US/USSR Initiatives, twenty years ago, next year. That Soviet travel set the tone for my present love of ranging about in the lesser-known places and it too, had the quality of something tangible formed out of nothing . That was not my own inventive work. I was just in on it.
Then, around the year 2000, I took some shorter trips to Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Central America, after having already done some exploring in Mexico and in New York City. But, if I hadn’t come up with the idea (and succeeded at it) of the latest Around-The-World journey, there would have been nothing to write a book about.
Without the book, being produced in this new and labor-intensive way, there would be nothing to blog about in my two new blogs. And, without my age being what it is and getting “ageier” all along, there would be no angle or curiosity about what I do, so no hook to distinguish this from all the other travel stories – and no Social Security to make it happen.
So, I was appreciating the Layers of Life, and how the foundations are formed for a permanent structure. Soon, this intense production period will be passed and a finished book will result. It will be a hard copy, a tangible evidence of something that didn’t exist until I performed it, wrote about it, and produced it. Then, as the present becomes the past and inevitably swallows up that accomplishment, the book will serve as a new foundation for future ventures, giving me more license and credibility than I had before.
These are the slow, deliberate steps of creation which living on a planet in the material plane requires. These are the slow, deliberate steps that making a baby requires. Then soon, there results a physical evidence – a book or a baby – to live on, and to which others can relate.
There is no reason, as long as I have my health and strength, that I can’t just keep on building upon this ever-strengthening foundation well into the future, becoming more and more unique as I age. All because I set about doing it a long time back. There is really no such thing as simply waking up one day and creating something full-blown without the foundation being laid.
Oh, probably people are thrust accidentally into the spotlight or they are suddenly “discovered,” but if they manage to stay there, it’s because they happen to have been prepared for it.
